September 1st, 2019
How does one define a good person? As society has evolved, the meaning of good and evil has changed. In current times, I believe a good person is someone who tries to bring success, happiness, and good health to all people and themselves equally regardless of their backgrounds. The individual may not be perfect, but the majority of the time, they adhere to this principle.
Originally, I had planned on writing my moral code in the style of the ten commandments, but I believe that this much shorter definition suffices. The vast majority of people aim to live like this already. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. There are still four fiends that inhibit our ability to truly follow this philosophy. I hope that be teaching about these four neo-horsemen of the apocalypse and their sickening impact on society during the easily impressionable stage of childhood, we can begin to loosen the rule of these pandemics. Even as an optimist, I do not affirm we can completely end these four horsemen's reign of anarchy. Still, we must remain hopeful, we can still swerve the tide and bring our species off the crash course of human caused climate change.
The first of these four horsemen is Ignorance. Even in the new digital age that we live in, there are a depressingly large number of people that choose to, or are manipulated to remain ignorant. Although I have not been alive for a long time, I have been seeing more leaders win through manipulating the populace than ever before. The first example to come to my mind is the United States.
Despite having the largest economy, The United States is one of the least advanced countries in the western world. The nation struggles with class divide where the top 1% can afford everything, where at the same time more than 40% cannot afford their basic needs such as healthcare and housing utilities. These people are quite desperate, so Trump plays off of this and manipulates them into believing that he is for the working class. Politicians like this usually blames the problem on something simple and believable, such as immigrants stealing jobs. When looking at the actual facts, countries accepting many immigrants are growing. Immigrants purposely move to areas of the country that are prospering with many job opportunities arising from multiple industries. They do not travel to cities where there is no job market to compete with the people struggling there. The displacement effect is insignificant, yet populists like Trump can exaggerate this issue that sounds logical without further study and get the middle class excited. It is easy for these people in a desperate situation to jump aboard a populists hate train. Alongside this, the politician often promises something along the lines of how they will make the country great again! Our vision is tinted by nostalgia, no matter how terrible a childhood may be, we almost always see the past as better than the present. Reverting to what was great in the past is almost certainly in the past for a reason.
Once an idea of hope gets into someone's head, it is unlikely to go away. This is not helped by the propaganda against the opposing party that these leaders often share with their supporters. It all boils down to the irritating phenonium of confirmation bias. Humans have the natural instinct to only interpret new evidence confirming one's existing beliefs. This is because it is easier to build upon something existing than to build an entire new frame of mind. The voter simply refuses to take in anything that does not strengthen their existing beliefs regarding the candidate. Problems such as these are difficult to combat as they are natural instincts. However, we must deal with them somehow to further our society to the next level. Perhaps my idea about educating the children will work, or perhaps it will not. We must work together to fight problems on this scale.
Of course, it goes without saying that this is not only a problem in the United States. More and more countries are electing far right populist leaders. Recent examples include Brazil and the United Kingdom. The root cause behind all of this as I wrote above is that our people are voting ignorant whether they know it, or not.
YOU ARE READING
Dreaming of a Perfect World
Non-FictionThe world is on fire. We're on the road to mass extinction in the very near future. It is not too late, we have the power to rid the world of its corruption. I've recently started coming up ideas to solve some of the problems our society faces, as w...
